معرفی
Ayesha A. Irani is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she specializes in Islam in South Asia, early-modern Bengali literature, and Sufism. Previously she was Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto (2013–15) and a visiting scholar at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies (2012–13). Her research interrogates how vernacular texts mediated the Islamization of Bengal and the wider Bay of Bengal world.
Education
- PhD with distinction, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2011
- MA, South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2004
- MA, Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, 1992
- BA with honors, Sanskrit, Elphinstone College, University of Mumbai, 1990
Research Focus
Irani’s scholarship centers on the literary, religious, and social histories of Bengal and Bangladesh from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She investigates how Sufi authors such as Saiyad Sultan rendered Islamic universal history into the idiom of rural Bengal, negotiated Hindu cosmologies, and forged new Muslim identities through translation, performance, and manuscript culture.
Major Publications & Impact
Her monograph The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press, 2021) was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion’s Book Award for Excellence. Recent articles explore pīr-cults, manuscript-to-print transitions, and the reception of Persian classics in Bengali Muslim circles, collectively demonstrating how textual practices shaped community formation on Bengal’s frontier.
Awards & Fellowships
- Patricia Crone Membership, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2021–22)
- AIIS Senior Short-Term Fellowship (2018–19)
- Endowed Faculty Career Development Award, UMass Boston (2016–17)
- Connaught New Researcher Award, University of Toronto (2014)
- Charlotte W. Newcombe & Briton Martin Dissertation Fellowships
- Finalist, ICAS Best PhD in the Humanities Prize (2013)
Professional Service & Outreach
Irani serves on the Board of Trustees of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (since 2018) and was a steering-committee member of the AAR’s Religion in South Asia section (2019–21). She has co-led a British-Library-funded project digitizing endangered manuscripts from the Rāmamālā Library, Comilla, and frequently collaborates with Bangladeshi scholars and archives.
Ongoing Projects
She is preparing a second monograph on the multifaceted figure of the Bengali fakir as seen in pre-colonial and colonial sources, while also studying the 5,019 Prabhāta Saṅgīta songs of the modern Bengali spiritual master Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.
